Ben Horowitz's message to early-stage founders on betting on yourself, the doubts that do the most damage, and why fear means you're doing it right: "Your job is to make your bet pay off. You believed in yourself enough to do it. There are gonna be many times when you question that bet and you question that belief, but that gets you nothing." "The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you. It's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them." "I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22 years old and he had a tremendous doubt about whether he was gonna make it." "It's not what you feel. It's what you do. You're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing." @bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen

BEN HOROWITZ SAYS AMAZON $AMZN CEO ANDY JASSY TOLD HIM AI SUPPLY IS SOLD OUT BEYOND 2028 "I said, yeah, like we're out of everything till 2028. He's like, oh, it's beyond 2028." Then he explained why that makes AI nothing like the dot-com bubble "In the internet bubble, we didn't have enough demand because we had to build the internet. People had to get broadband. Originally they had to get their browser at Fry's. There weren't enough consumers on the internet to absorb all the bandwidth that had gotten built out." "The lack of demand killed it. We don't really have a lack of demand in AI, so I think the dynamics will be different." He did flag one risk. "If you get into a pathological debt situation, that can wreck anybody." He said that's why Andreessen Horowitz isn't invested in any of the neoclouds. "That whole thing scares me, having been through it."

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz says creativity and relationship-building will become more valuable as AI takes over more routine work. “The grind-them-out tasks, AI is already really good at.” (Via @a16z)

Ben Horowitz: “The most dangerous thing going on in AI is Anthropic and Bill Gates” “Anybody can go say, ‘AI is going to kill us,’ and you'll be on every major news station and every newspaper and so forth. I think it's extremely dangerous, though, when it comes from Bill Gates because he is so credible, because he did build Microsoft, and people think of him that way, and then certainly he's been a big political donor, so he has a lot of political juice, particularly on the Democratic side. The big risk that everybody talks about is that the models are going to recursively self-improve, and then they're going to take off, and then they're going to become so smart and run away from us. Well, what would be the preconditions for that? Ali Ghodsi from Databricks had a great formulation of, ‘Well, what would be the preconditions for that?’ And he had four preconditions. One is that the next model has to require fewer GPUs than the last. The second thing is the next model has to take less time to train. And then the accuracy of the next model has to be better than the last, so it's got to be a better model. And then finally, it's gotta keep happening again and again and again. Zero of those four have been met. We're not on track for any of those four to be met, and so we're really talking about a risk that's entirely theoretical at this point that we're not mapping to.”

Ben Horowitz: “Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies that we've ever seen in terms of security.” “I'll tell you a funny story. So when we first got Opus 4.5, we were doing cybersecurity checks for the firm. So we had an agent basically set up a website for a pet store. And then we took another agent and said, ‘Tell us if we can exploit that web store.’ And it gave us all the exploits it could find. So Opus 4.5 wrote really buggy code. Great. And then we said, ‘Oh, the SQL injection, is that actually exploitable that you found?’ And it goes, ‘Let's pop it open.’ And the agent using Opus 4.5 breaks into the website and steals all the customer data immediately. We then call Anthropic, and what they tell us is, ‘You prompted it wrong.’ Like that was their answer.”

Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they now face the opposite problem: "It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us." "In 1999, bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it. It was very hard to get it. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001, it was $50 a megabit... And if you borrowed money to get it, you're dead." "That kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur." "I think the core dynamic of AI has been working for CoreWeave, though, in that there's a massive shortage, not an overage of supply... Token prices have gone down, but GPU prices have not." "And by the way, data center space is going up in price because even labor to build data centers is hard. The politics are making it hard to build data centers. So the whole supply chain price is going up and demand is not subsiding." "Those are very big tailwinds for CoreWeave, despite the fact that the debt markets, kind of independent of them, are tough." @bhorowitz w/ @chamath on @allinpod

Ben Horowitz says $AMZN CEO told him AI compute is sold out “beyond 2028” as demand continues to outpace available capacity. That tells you how much of AI buildout now depends on getting enough power, cooling and data centers online rather than just securing more $NVDA or $AMD GPUs. It’s also why I think drawdowns in $NBIS, $IREN and $CRWV are overdone because new capacity could find demand quickly while existing GPUs keep generating revenue longer than market expects.

Ben Horowitz says Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, told him AI compute is sold out till 2028 and beyond: “This shortage is so bad. You know, I was speaking with Andy Jassy, who runs Amazon, yesterday. And I said, yeah, we’re out of everything, you know, till 2028. He’s like, it’s beyond 2028. I don’t think we get stuff back, end of 2028, maybe. So everything else is sold out.” Via @theallinpod, @firesidealpha $AMZN